Google App Engine Blog

News, notes, tips and tricks from the Google App Engine Team

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

When we launched Google App Engine to 10,000 developers in early April, we were looking for feedback from the community. Since then, even though we've since expanded to 75,000 developers, the request we've heard most often has been to open up the preview release and give more people the chance to use it to deploy their apps to Google's scalable infrastructure. With more than 80,000 of you still waiting to use App Engine we're especially pleased today to announce that we are opening the flood gates--now anyone who wants to use App Engine can give it a try! So, if you haven't already, head over to our Admin Console and create your first application. Note: you'll need to verify your account with a mobile phone before doing so.

App Engine will always be free to get started, and we plan on enabling developers to purchase more computing resources sometime this year. Although we're not ready to offer this ability now, we've been asked by many developers to provide some insight into how we'll be pricing App Engine usage for applications that have exceeded the free quota of 500 MB of storage and around 5M pageviews per month. We'd like to be transparent about this, and have announced today that developers can expect to pay:

$0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour

$0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage

$0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth

$0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

Likewise in response to your feedback we are also providing 2 new APIs, the image manipulation API and the Memcache API.

The image manipulation API enables developers to resize, rotate, flip, crop and enhance images using the same infrastructure used in Picasa Web Albums. With the images API you can perform common image related tasks like thumbnailing images via a simple interface. For more information about the images API, please see our documentation.

The Memcache API is a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster by reducing datastore queries and improving the performance of your application. The Memcache API was written by Brad Fitzpatrick, the same developer who created memcached, a caching layer that is used in some of the world's most popular web applications, and is compatible with memcached implementations. Please see our documentation for more information about the Memcache API.

These features and improvements were motivated by your feedback and participation in our development process. We're working hard to respond to all of your requests so please continue to share them with us!